Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience

A related anecdote: A few years ago, I asked my friend, a neuroscientist specializing in vision, why it's sometimes painful to look at the sky. After confirming that it's unrelated to cloud cover but vaguely correlated with the seasons, he suggested that it might be that I'm sensitive to the polarization of light, but said that this was unlikely since mammals in general are supposedly not capable of detecting it. Polarized glasses are cheap, though, so I tried them, and they entirely fixed the problem - notably, regular sunglasses do not - indicating that that is probably the case.

Even more interestingly, I discovered that some significant parts of my visual experience were related to polarization: Detecting the rotation of distant reflective objects (panes of glass, leaves) is helped by it, for one. More significantly, perceiving how far away objects are is affected by it: It's easier for me to tell how far away a small, relatively still object is without the glasses, but also much easier for me to tell how fast a large object is approaching with them, and I find crossing busy roads to be much less stressful that way. I also find certain kinds of reflective surfaces confusing with the glasses, but entirely sensible without them.

I may simply be unclear on what it means to be "wrong about the subjective quality of your own conscious experience," but it seems to me that this post is completely irrelevant to that question. All of the evidence shows flaws in our predictive ability, our memory, and our language. I don't see any contradictions or wrongness; indeed, I'm still unsure what such would look like. I'll go through it step by step.

Someone predicted that people couldn't experience echolocation. He was wrong. No evidence was offered that he could experience echolocation. Moreover, comparing the ability of the untrained to notice the difference between a T-shirt and a mixing bowl, and the ability of a bat or dolphin to render rich detail is disingenuous. But disputing the detail is besides the point: his mistake was about his abilities, not his actual experience. It's not like he experienced echolocation and didn't know it, or failed to and thought he did.

Does a coin look circular? This seems to be purely semantic and, if anything, a product of language. No one is disputing my ability to see a coin or predict or understand its properties. The problem is mostly whether we're describing the image on our retina or the translation our brain maps onto it. We see an elliptical image which we almost inseverably perceive as round because of the operations our brain does. I don't see anyone making a mistake about what coins look like, or having some erroneous experience.

When you're asked to imagine something, your brain does one thing. When you're asked to reflect on your imagination, or recall your brain has trouble doing so. This doesn't seem like someone being wrong about conscious experience so much as (at most) having difficulty consciously remembering a prior experience. Where's the error?

Dreaming in color - I don't even see where you're going with this. Some people do, some don't. It changes over time. Where's the error? Are there people who think they dream in color but don't, or vice versa? How is this relevant?

[ETA: Further discussion suggests the argument: there isn't a real change in frequency of color in dreams, but there is one in reporting, therefore, people are making mistakes. To that, I think there are two responses:

1. This evidence is very weak. It's entirely possible that there has been a change in dream color. Since we have no idea what causes it, it's rather hasty to say, "More (or fewer) people must be making mistakes than did before." It's not impossible, it's just weak evidence where we have no understanding of the mechanism.

2. This is likely a language error. For many people, dreams are unlike the waking world. This is rather like the circular/elliptical coin. It's not information about the dreams. It's not a problem with us experiencing our dreams.]

There are things that occur below our consciousness - this seems principally an issue of memory. Our brain doesn't register (and certainly doesn't record) certain things. There's no error here. It's not that I feel I have no feet when I do, or that I feel I am not driving when I am.

It's possible I've simply misinterpreted the claim you're making. But if it's:

you can be wrong about the subjective quality of your own conscious experience.

I really fail to see a single shred of evidence in everything you cite. You show that there are errors in our memory and our ability to predict, but you do not offer a single example of someone being wrong about the subjective quality of their own experience - it doesn't even seem like you suggest what such error would look like.

Even if I am missing something, it still seems like your point is that "What constitutes your subjective experience is unclear" not "X is a subjective experience that is wrong."

"We can be wrong about our subjective experiences" is a very broad and maybe misleading way of summarizing this information.

You've shown that we can sometimes fail to consciously pick up on certain channels of sensory information (like echolocation) or fail to consciously appreciate certain qualities of our sensory experience (like the ellipticalness of coins or the vagueness of imagery).

But all your examples have the quality that if we consciously think about them, we realize our mistake (I know this is kind of unfair to you as you couldn't have used an example that didn't have that quality because people wouldn't admit they were wrong about it). So this post only re-affirms that there is a conscious-unconscious distinction, and that lots of the things we think are fully conscious processes are the conscious shadows of larger unconscious processes.

When I think of being wrong about subjective experience, I think of being wrong about the "contents" of "my" "own" "consciousness". The problem here isn't that I'm wrong about my consciousness, it's that certain things never entered my consciousness to begin with and were handled by unconscious routines without me noticing. As soon as I think about them consciously, I'm no longer wrong.

This is also how people like Descartes used the idea of subjective experience, and I don't think knowing about these examples would make Descartes hesitate to say with certainty that he can be sure he's really thinking if he thinks he's thinking.

Some neat tidbits about our ability to recall our conscious experience and about how difficult it is to hold a passing thought in memory long enough to analyze it, but it is a total strawman of Hume's (and many others') position that "I cannot be wrong about my subjective experience."

What you've done here is equivocate on the term "subjective experience," using it in the introduction as if it were going mean your current, right-this-moment experience (e.g., "I am in pain now," which imparts a huge wow factor for readers, so I can see why), then proceeded to give a bunch of examples where "subjective experience" means something you subjectively experienced in the past, or had trouble bringing fully into conscious awareness in the first place.

Then, at the very end, you equivocate back to the Humean sense of this-moment conscious experience and flounder into this whopper:

We can be wrong about our own subjective conscious experiences. Thus, they cannot serve as a bedrock for certainty and a priori truth.

Sure, past subjective conscious experience is something we can be wrong about. We can misremember things. Hume's (and others') point is that we cannot be wrong about things like, "I am seeing blue right now." If you doubt things like that, you must apply at least that same level of doubt to everything else, such as whether you are really reading a LessWrong comment instead of being chased by hungry sharks right now.

I've been enjoying your recent posts, but I wish you would resist the urge to sensationalize and overgeneralize just to grab more eyeballs.

Since nobody's linked it directly here, I should probably point out that an old draft of Perplexities of Consciousness is available online.

Also it might be worth pointing in the post that blind echolocators typically do not realize they are echolocating unless it is pointed out to them.

In fact, let me go ahead and just paste in here another quote from that book (not as a suggestion to add to the post, I don't mean, but a neat thing to point out):

You might think that the blind, whose abilities at echolocation are generally thought to be superior to those of normally sighted people, and who often actively use echolocation to dodge objects in novel environments, would be immune to such ignorance. Not so. For example, one of the two blind participants in Supa and colleagues’ 1944 study believed that his ability to avoid collisions was supported by cutaneous sensations in his forehead and that sound was irrelevant and distracted him (p. 144 and 146). Although asked to attend carefully to what allowed him to avoid colliding with silent obstacles, it was only after a long series of experiments, with and without auditory information, and several resultant collisions, that he was finally convinced. Similarly Philip Worchel and Karl Dallenbach (1947) report a nearly blind participant convinced that he detected the presence of objects by feeling pressure on his face. Like Supa’s subject, he was disabused of this idea only after long experimentation. (This participant, it turned out, used his impoverished visual sense of light and dark more than tactile or echoic information.) Such opinions used to be so common among the blind – until Supa, Dallenbach, and their collaborators demonstrated otherwise – that the blind’s ability to avoid objects in novel and changing environments was widely regarded as a tactile or tactile-like “facial vision”, perhaps underwritten by feeling air currents or the like (see Diderot 1749/1916; James 1890/1981; Hayes 1935; Supa et al. 1944; the negligible relevance of air currents is shown by participants’ excellent performance when ears are uncovered and cloth is draped over the rest of the face and their poor performance when ears are stopped and the face is left clear). Presumably, if blind people experience auditory echoic phenomenology, and if they are – as people in general are widely assumed to be – accurate judges of their phenomenology, it should occur to them that they detect silent objects at least in part through audition. They should not make such large mistakes about the informational underpinnings of their object sense.

I think the temptation is very strong to notice the distinction between the elemental nature of raw sensory inputs and the cognitive significance they are the bearers of. And this is so, and is useful to do, precisely to the extent that the cognitive significance will vary depending on context and background knowledge, such as light levels, perspective, etc. because those serve as dynamically updated calibrations of cognitive significance. But these calibrations become transparent with use, so that we see, hear and feel vividly and directly in three dimensions because we have learned that that is the cognitive significance of what we see, hear, feel and navigate through. Subjective experience comes cooked and raw in the same dish. It then takes an analytic effort of abstraction of a painter's eye to notice that it takes an elliptical shape on a focal plane to induce the visual experience of a round coin on a tabletop. Thus ambiguities, ambivalences and confusions abound about what constitutes the contents of subjective experience.

I'm reminded of an experiment I read about quite some time ago in a very old Scientific American I think, in which (IIRC) psychology subjects were fitted with goggles containing prisms that flipped their visual fields upside down. They wore them for upwards of a month during all waking hours. When they first put them on, they could barely walk at all without collapsing in a heap because of the severe navigational difficulties. After some time, the visual motor circuits in their brains adapted, and some were even able to re-learn how to ride a bike with the goggles on. After they could navigate their world more or less normally, they were asked whether at anytime their visual field ever "flipped over" so that things started looking "right side up" again. No, there was no change, things looked the same as when they first put the goggles on. So then things still looked "upside down"? After a while, the subjects started insisting that the question made no sense, and they didn't know how to answer it. Nothing changed about their visual fields, they just got used to it and could successfully navigate in it; the effect became transparent.

(Until they took the goggles off after the experiment ended. And then they were again seriously disoriented for a time, though they recovered quickly.)

You present some interesting material but I don't think it supports your conclusion. For example, that I am unaware of some of my perceptual abilities does not entail that I'm wrong about my own subjective experience. Subjective experience is generally taken to mean consciousness and I cannot be conscious of something of which I am unaware. Perhaps my hidden talent for echolocation has covertly aided me in the past but, by definition, it can't be part of what I was conscious of and therefore wasn't part of my subjective experience. This also applies to your example of the persistence of experience.

Seeing the elliptical occlusion shape of the coin is how we see that it is circular - i.e., a circular coin has an elliptical occlusion shape relative to a line of sight. The elliptical occlusion shape of the coin isn't subjective at all. It's an objective fact about coins that they have elliptical occlusion shapes relative to a given line of sight (this is easily seen by tracing the outline of a coin on a pane of glass).

Schwitzegebel's questions about the imagined scene cause confusion because they don't apply to an imagined scene. You can imagine a house with a red door but if you imagine a house you cannot discover that it has a red door (although you can imagine that you discovered a house had a red door). Similarly, you can dream of colour, but it's senseless to ask if somebody dreams in colour. If I frequently dream of the house with the red door I might tell you, with certainty, that of course I dream in colour but if I simply dream about a house I might report my dreams as colourless.

Everybody's always citing Hume, but nobody ever seems to do him any justice. The OP is simply yet another example in this trend. I have no idea whether after reading the first paragraph of your post, Hume would agree that he couldn't "bring himself to seriously doubt the content of his own subjective experience", but I'm pretty sure that by the end of it, he would summarily reject your interpretation of his epistemology.

First of all, to make what I'm saying at least sound plausible, I need only give you one counter-example:

• He referred to our propensity to ascribe a place to each sound as an illusion. According to Hume, a sound exists nowhere. Of course our natural reaction is to balk at those words, but that's only because we so strongly associate the object that caused the sound (e.g., a TV), with the sound itself (i.e., your subjective experience we call "the sound it's making"). But they're clearly separate in our subjective experience, and unlike the TV, the sound has neither a shape nor a location. (1)

There he's clearly not taking it for granted that we never get confused about the content of our subjective experience. He thinks that sounds exist nowhere, but he also recognizes that it's more natural to get confused and not notice that. According to Hume, our natural tendency is to be wrong about this aspect of our subjective experience. Perhaps he would also agree that there are more cases like this?

But I haven't proven you wrong yet. I've only tried to throw some doubt on your side. At this point, all I can do is sit back and ask you, "Can you cite me a significant number of instances where Hume contradicts the insight in your post, and perhaps by doing so, leads himself into error?" I mean, I have virtually no doubt that that's an impossible task, but then again I'll still be here if you try to shoot me down.

(1) From Human Nature. He starts off by saying this, and then moves on to saying this. If you want, ctrl-f to find exactly where those quotes came from. Perhaps I didn't do justice to his insight about our subjective experience of sound and whatever, but it's okay. I was only trying to show you an example of where he implied that we can be wrong about the content of our own subjective experience.

I think it's important to distinguish between subjective experience and verbal reports of subjective experience.

You've convinced me that my verbal reports of subjective experience are untrustworthy. The next time I make (or am tempted to make) an assertion like "I see a right angle," I will ask myself, "Do I really see a right angle? What is actually going on here?" whereas before I would not have bothered to do so. So, thank you for the help understanding myself. That's a big step.

On the other hand, you haven't quite made out the case for distrusting the experiences themselves. For example, suppose I dream of a quasi-red door. Duly skeptical about verbal reports, I do not verbally specify whether the door was red or grey or colorless or something strangely in-between. However, I remember the dream, and label the dream as "Dream X." When I wake up in the morning, I log "Dream X" in my dream journal. The next night, I have Dream X again. The night after, I dream of a completely colorless door, and don't label it as Dream X. I'm doing (epistemologically) useful work here, right? Even if I can't reliably describe exactly what the dream corresponds to in formal, verbal, explicit terminology, I'm still keeping track of whether I had a particular experience or not. I don't see any reason to question and double-check whether I actually dreamed about a sort-of-reddish door or was just imagining that I dreamed about it. Do you?

Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained is a very relevant piece of work here. Early in his book, he seeks to establish that our intuitions about our own perceptions are faulty, and provides several scientific examples to build his case. The Wikipedia entry on his multiple drafts theory gives a reasonable summary.

Neat. Your conclusions don't surprise me much, but I hadn't heard of the evaluating-your-mental-imagery exercise before. It's obvious to me now that my mental images are very foggy; they're mostly concept with a small amount of visual detail attached. However, I'm sure this a faculty that can be improved. Before I started my music training, songs stuck in my head were tuneless, basically the lyrics in rhythm but in a kind of monotone. After 7 years of being in bands and choirs, I can now hear tunes in key in my head (imagining melodies involves feeling them in my throat a little, as if I were singing them) and I can even "hear" chords by superposing several notes. (Composers such as Mozart had incredible capacities to do this, which I will probably never be able to mimic...my imagined melodies still lack "texture" i.e. the difference in sound between a flute, trumpet, voice, etc). Presumably I or anyone else could do the same with mental images by doing some kind of art training.

As an aside, in a novel I wrote, there is a community of children that use echolocation to 'see' objects underwater in flooded houses.

The conclusion may be a bit of overstretch (not that it isn't right in some sense, but relative to the argument in this post): it seems that the modern defenders of introspective knowledge of conscious experience (Mary seeing red, etc) have only a very limited sort of access in mind.

Today I added the 'Sound and vision biases' section to the original post, having just discovered the cited studies on auditory bias and the descent illusion.

I think part of the disagreement over this is that the usual, simple model of qualia is too limited. That's an easy mistake to make, given that the normal examples of qualia are things that are directly reported by sensory organs, but in practice qualia have much more to do with our brains than our eyes and ears and so on, and don't have a 1:1 correspondence with sensory information in most cases.

Take lukeprog's coin ellipse/circle example. It's pretty trivial to show that the outline of a coin from most perspectives is an ellipse, but that doesn't mean that a person's brain is going to generate only that quale for the shape of the coin: It knows, in some sense, that the coin is circular, and reports that, either along with the ellipse quale (perhaps on a different 'channel'), or, more likely, instead of it.

This is more obvious when considering sensory information that's 'read'. I find it to be very obvious in speech, for example - I actually perceive three separate 'channels' of information when I'm listening to speech; one for the actual sound, one for the emotional tone-of-voice content, and one for the parsed words. Importantly, the latter two 'channels' are also communicated as streams of qualia; they're just not communicated as streams of sound-qualia, but as visual and conceptual qualia respectively. (Have I mentioned that I'm synesthetic? That may be relevant, especially to the emotional/visual channel.) Reading text and reading body language also seem to involve the same effect; I rarely-to-never consciously notice the shapes of words that I'm reading, but mostly just perceive a stream of concept-qualia, and fluently reading body language seems to involve a similar stream of emotion-qualia without, or with only secondary, awareness of the relevant details of how a person looks.

These derived qualia seem likely to vary considerably from one person to another, for obvious reasons, but it seems likely that most people use them more than they use first-order qualia, and often instead of them. Thus, it does make sense and would not necessarily be incorrect for someone to say that they perceive a coin as a circle rather than an ellipse, since it's nontrivially likely that they are in fact perceiving a 'circular' quale, generated by their brain to report the coin's shape in 3d space.

Having read your post, and asking myself "Can I be wrong about my own subjective experience?", I find myself wondering why I'm even asking such a question. The answer seems to depend on what I want to achieve with it. Perhaps I should wait for your later posts in this series before I begin really answering. With an endgame in mind, the OP's question would be more productively and fruitfully answered.

A circular coin held at a slant to you doesn't look like a true ellipse. The half that's closer to you will be fuller and the half that's away from you will be flatter because of perspective.

ETA: Pfft points out below that circles actually map to ellipses under perspective projection. Before I posted this, I took a look at an angled circle, and it looked as I described it-- at the moment, they're looking like true ellipses.

Speaking of the yellow banana, people do a lot of filling in with color. Take a careful look at someone who's wearing a monochrome garment. Very little of it will be the color you think it is-- most of it will be much lighter or much darker, and this doesn't take into account the effects of the colors of nearby objects getting reflected onto it.

It took a major effort of will for me to hear the way I pronounce water. I have a Delaware accent, and I say warter. It looks ugly in print, but it sounds wetter and altogether more like H2O than the more usual wahter-- which also looks weird in print.

My last name is Lebovitz. Most of the people I've dealt with can't say it accurately or remember it, even if they're told it twice, had it spelled for them, and shown it in print. The problem is that Leibowitz is more common, and most people seem to slot in the more common name so strongly that they can't perceive immediate sensory input that's a little different.

This is an irritant for me, but the cognitively important aspect is that if something so simple (all the phonemes in my name are part of the standard English set) and objective is so hard to perceive, how much more are we missing which doesn't have a person saying "that's a short 'e' and a 'v' not a 'w' " to us?

I've heard that lots of people used to end up dreaming in black and white as a result of watching lots of black-and-white TV.

See also: Tim Wilson's book Strangers to Ourselves.

What is the character of an imagined scene?

I believe that the best we can say about people's visual imagination is that there's a continuum. Some people have no visual imagination at all, and then there are people with eidetic memory so advanced I hazard to say they need to "imagine" anything at all, pun intended.

I've been thinking about this recently because my grandmother is dying and it bothers me that I can't imagine what she looks like. Or anyone, for that matter. All I end up imagining is a fragment of her hair, an eye, or some other piece of her face. It's disconcerting.

"the human of traffic" is a phrase I had never heard before.

The elliptical coin case is a good one for understanding the concept of qualia. As you move your head, your cognitions about the coin don't change: you still affirm its circularity. Your visual perception remains consistent with that affirmation - but still, something about that perception is changing. The shape and extent of the copper-colored qualia are changing (the coin is a penny). If we want to, we can change our focus from the usual objective facts and describe these aspects of subjective experience. That's the point at which the word "elliptical" might be used.

Still, unless the angle is extreme or the coin distant, your visual cortex still knows that it's looking at a circular object. So in that sense, it still "looks circular".

The section about "imagined scenes" reminds me very much of the post Generalizing from One Example. I think that post and this one can be taken together to imply that, since we can be wrong about our own subjective experiences, we can be even more wrong when we try to model others' subjective experiences naively (based on our own unexamined misinterpretations). That makes the reflective process, as you describe in the conclusion, even more important.

Also, I do dream in color (as far as I know).

Very interesting article, Luke, I think I might try some of those echolating exercises.

A somewhat random observation: I dream in color but I hallucinate in black and white. I've only ever hallucinated in dark rooms when I've just woken up so I suppose this is not terribly surprising.

Although I very rarely have hallucinations it happens that I did have one the night before last. I woke up in the middle of the night and saw a toddler climbing the door of the room I was in with unnatural jerky motions. The toddler was about the same age as my daughter but was clearly not my daughter. If I looked away from the door everything seemed normal but when I looked at the door again the toddler was still there. My wife and daughter were asleep in the same room at the time. Since I find hallucinating mildly distressful I thought about waking up my wife but in the end decided not to bother her, closed my eyes and went back to sleep.

I had consumed alcohol in moderation the evening before and I was coming down with a mild case of flu. We were away from home. I don't know if any of these was a causal factor.

I've had visual hallucinations a few times before. On one occasion I had an auditory hallucination - I found that significantly more unnerving.

Funnily enough, I have never once noticed the elliptical shape of a coin when viewed at an angle. It just looked like a perfectly round circle, only tilted slightly.

If I had to guess, I'd say my brain doesn't process spatial information all that well, so my looking at a tilted coin was very similar to a middle school student reading about trigonometry- no glint of recognition whatsoever. To them it just looks like funny words and numbers.

Today I learned of another example. I was unaware that humans perceive changes in 'approaching' sounds as greater than equivalent changes in 'receding' sounds. Also, 'approaching' sounds are perceived as occurring closer to us than equivalent receding sounds. The evolutionary story being told about the origin of this bias should be obvious.

Neuhoff (2001). An adaptive bias in the perception of looming auditory motion. Ecological Psychology, 13: 87-110.

It's not clear that there IS a fact of the matter on many of these questions. Not in the sense of being subjective, but simply the question not making sense to ask. In fact, this is how I experience it to be, but as we just established that could be wrong, and even if it's right I have reasons to believe my subjective experience might be different from that of most people.

Time for a poll:

Pre-scientific authors tended to assume they dreamed in color, while studies in the first half of the 20th century found very few people who reported dreaming in color.

This is extremely unsurprising, given that the world was in black and white until sometime in the 1930's.

ETA: I'd hope such a patently absurd statement would get people to follow the link. I was evidently wrong. If you follow the link (which is a classic!), you'll see the point was intended to be humorous. My bad.

As Psychohistorian already wrote my reaction to this post for me, I'll just leave this somewhat relevant story by Smullyan here.

Pre-scientific authors tended to assume they dreamed in color, while studies in the first half of the 20th century found very few people who reported dreaming in color. In the 1960s, this consensus was overturned, and recent studies show that today, more than 80% of people report that they dream in color.

I think I once heard someone hypothesize that people in the early/mid-20th century tended to dream in black and white as a result of watching lots of TV/films in black and white.